Learn from my mistakes, you don't have time to make them yourself

Resolving assembly bind failures on a server

Sometimes things just don’t go to plan went you deploy your software to a server. Unfortunately servers don’t come with all your dev tooling so it can be hard to figure out what is going wrong when provided some cryptic exception message.

My current issue is testing deployment of a 4.0 framework built WCF service to a newly provisioned Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. I get the classic WCF error message saying that the service type could not be found for the endpoint. It doesn’t tell me why and I know the service assemblies are in place. Given prior experience I am guessing that the most likely cause is that other dependencies of my service assemblies are not on the machine.

I look to FUSLOGVW.exe to find out these answers. The issue is that this great utility is not on the server image as it comes out of the .Net SDK. With a bit of trickery, it can be used on a server. These are the steps to get this done.